UPA COULD NOT DELIVER JOBS, MODI DOING NO BETTER: RAHUL
Rahul Gandhi has said he believes leaders such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump were elected because of a growing need for jobs, and the Indian leader had failed to deliver and may face the same backlash as the Congress.
“I think the central reason why Mr Modi arose and to an extent why Mr Trump came, is the question of jobs in India and in the US,” Gandhi told a group of students at Princeton University on Tuesday.
“There’s a large part of our populations that simply does not have jobs and cannot see a future. And so they are feeling pain. And they have supported these type of leaders,” Gandhi said, adding that Modi’s record on job creation was “not good enough”.
“Those same people who were angry with us because we couldn’t a deliver those 30,000 jobs are going to get angry with Mr Modi,” Gandhi said, about the rise of Modi and Trump.
“There is anger building up in India right now, we can sense it,” he added.
Gandhi has spoken forcefully about the need to create 30,000 jobs a day as the key challenge facing India in his view, and he has emphasised this at most of his interactions during his two-week US tour, which winds down on Wednesday with an outreach to the Indian-American community at Times Square in New York.
He addressed a wide range of issues at Princeton and spoke with passion about the need for all-around openness and transparency, and issued a stinging denouncement of the closed law-making process in India, saying as parliamentarians “we sit in parliament, we have conversations, but we don’t make laws”.
Laws, he told the students, were being made in India “by bureaucrats and by ministers…and parliament, itself, just validates” them. He was answering a question on what needs to be done to enhance the work and reach of Parliament and the law making process.
Building on his point, Gandhi said the standard of parliamentary debate was “excellent” in the 1950s because those members of parliament made laws. Current parliamentarians don’t, and this reflects in the quality of debate, which he said was of “poor quality” as is widely held.
The larger point Gandhi made was that law-making was a closed process in India, and opening it up would lead to its improvement, greater participation by parliamentarians and the involvement of experts. Openness and transparency, he said, had always served India well.
While criticising the Modi government on job creation and other issues, Gandhi acknowledged in response to a question that he agreed with some of Modi’s initiatives – the Make in India programme for one, he said.
But he added he would pay more attention to small and medium enterprises. He also pointed to the Goods and Sales Tax in this context as a good move, and one that the Congress supported. But, he added, that he would have implemented it differently.
Gandhi returned to the theme of openness and transparency several times, tying it to his other pet issue of decentralisation, the lack of which, he argued, was all pervasive, permeating even the judiciary, where centralisation was at the root of judicial delay.
“Complete centralisation. Pretty much every case ends up in the Supreme Court,” Gandhi said. “So, decentralise, make the district courts actually work, make the state courts actually work and solve the problem at the periphery instead of bringing every single problem to the centre.
“The Supreme Court is supposed to give you direction, it is supposed to work on fundamental cases. So that’s the problem everywhere in India.”
Gandhi went on to suggest, drawing from his own attempts to democratise some wings of his party, that people don’t like transparency “because it disturbs people…it’s disruptive”.